


life is lived on other stages

by lilypadwriter



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 20:02:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20954117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilypadwriter/pseuds/lilypadwriter
Summary: Richie has only ever known beauty to mean one thing.





	life is lived on other stages

**Author's Note:**

> this is more of like. a Writing exercise than just a cohesive piece of writing but asdfsdfa! i just....adore these two so much

Before anyone else, there was Eddie. 

If Richie’s tender heart was carved from his chest and replaced with his genesis, Eddie would be holding the knife (with some kind of perverse glee, no doubt, that jackass). That wasn’t to say Eddie was his first friend - Stanley, all sparrow-boned and doe-kneed, shy as a button in middle school as he sat next to the boy with dirty hands and sparkling eyes. Stanley, with a quick word on the tip of his tongue, faster even than Richie. Stanley, swinging a baseball bat with arms that looked as if a subtle wind could snap them. 

But Richie could draw a line between himself and his closest friend; he could say, _ this is where I end and Stan begins. _He’d sooner cut off his right arm than untangle his threads from Eddie’s, which ---

“Stop staring at me.” Snapped from reprieve, Richie blinks himself awake. His hands grasp at the hospital chair, pulling himself up. 

“I’m not staring.” He was. It’s all he does now. Boy marred by childhood, he had starved himself with little glances, grown insatiable (there were limits that he put up, he could only teasingly hold Eddie’s hand once every two months, he could only elbow Eddie’s side every few weeks). He kept himself carefully regulated, paced himself so he didn’t grow greedy.

Now, he feasted. Tearing his eyes away from Eddie was a fate worse than death. He isn’t sure either of them would even survive if he took his eyes away. 

“Jesus, Richie. Way to make me feel like even more of a fucking freak.” Ex-asthmatic slumped further against the bed. Eyes flutter away, butterfly caught in glass, as more of the Losers file into the hospital room.

Richie wants to say: _ I’m staring because you’re beautiful. _There is a world he has not let himself touch and it is curled up, quiet and throbbing, in Eddie’s chest. There is a gentle divide between Eddie’s lips, the softest breath dusting free from them - Richie held his hopes there. There is the thin line of his shoulders, the broad slant of his personality. There is Eddie, and how could he ever not look?

But the room is full and Eddie is silent, so he says: _ Hey, you’re always gonna be a freak to me, Eds. Don’t worry about it. _

* * *

“You’re always gonna be a freak to me, Eds. Don’t worry about it.” 

Richie’s face was blotted out by the sudden flood of people; really, he hadn’t remembered his friends taking up so much space. What had been a rather average sized room was sitting tight around everyone’s shoulders. Beverly was bending over the bed, handling a pillow, shuffling the blanket around his body. “Do you need another pillow?” she murmured, pressing her fingers to Eddie’s forehead. “I’m going to get you another pillow.” Shuffling from the room, Beverly spared one look around at the audience, before disappearing around the corner. 

“She’s getting you another pillow,” Richie murmured, by his ear, smile touched in his voice. Eddie turned his head, slightly. 

_ “Back up, your breath smells.” _

“You’re the one who keeps crawling into my lap at any chance you get!” 

Their little hide-out was only home to Richie and Eddie in the last days of summer. Cracks were already steadily spreading across their bonds, the spider-leg fractures forcing them to collapse apart (he doesn’t mind, he doesn’t mind, he doesn’t mind ---). Really, who cared that high school was going to force Richie away from his closest friends? He couldn’t be a loser forever.

“You know that I was reading this comic! You only took it to be a nuisance!” And it is like this: Eddie’s back pressed into Richie’s chest, elbow resting harsh into his ribs, head tucked under chin. It’s an absolutely abhorrently uncomfortable position, Richie is filled with the urge to shove the other away so he could get feeling in his legs again, but he suffers through it. Richie can see goosebumps rise over Eddie’s skin when he breathes against his neck. 

A comic was held in Eddie’s hand, still stubbornly on the first page. Reading the comic, his ass. 

In his braver days, Richie would lean forward and trace his lips over the goosebumps. Eddie would still, always surprised whenever they ventured over the thin borders they had created, but he’d never pull away. They outgrew the hammock, the faint intimacy, that destruction of the status quo that could only exist beneath the world. They outgrew each other later, when high school hit, when the world opened up. 

* * *

It was with absolutely no subtlety that the losers decided to leave them alone. Slow at first, glances were thrown around the room so sharply that Richie was worried they’d shatter a vase, or Eddie’s heart monitor, or just his heart. 

“Should we -?” Beverly began, hands dropping away from the pillow she had been accosting for at least an hour.

“I was just thinking that we should -” Ben started, and then glanced, and everyone glanced, and Richie and Eddie made sure not to look at each other. 

“I left something in my car,” Bill chimed in, forsaking whatever lead Ben and Beverly where attempting to establish. And then, everyone standing to their feet, saying goodbyes, hurrying from the room. Beverly stopped at the door, without turning back, and then eased it closed behind her. 

“That was almost impressively embarrassing,” Eddie laughed, or tried to laugh. The sound was caught in his throat, ended by a wince. He straightened himself up, balancing on arms that seemed as if they were seconds away from stopping. Richie dived forward to help him, but Eddie waved him away. 

“I think they’re trying to hint at something,” Richie said, still waiting a little too close to Eddie’s bed as if he was ready to swoop in at any moment. “Maybe they want me to smother you with a pillow.”

“Real funny, asshole,” Eddie snapped, but there was a smile over his lips. His head turned a little to watch Richie, a vestige of childhood that had wrapped itself around his heart (his gaze had always managed to fly back to his closest friend, fluttering over to that twittering voice to drink in every excuse to look). 

“You look like shit.”

“I’m never fucking risking my life for you again, you know that? Next time, you can fend for yourself.”

He had grown paler, stolen away from the sun in this little room - not that Eddie had ever been anything close to tan, but he could pass for a pillow himself. It didn’t help that his hair was so dark, splattering of stubble growing in patches across his skin. 

Eddie’s eyes fell closed, the labyrinth of green and purple veins slithering across his eyelids. “Hey,” Richie breathed, reaching out gently to push at his shoulder. Eddie’s hand lifted to press against his own, so sudden that a shock stopped and started Richie’s heart.

“Just tired,” Eddie hummed, letting his eyes slide open for a breath, before they fell closed again. “You gonna stay here?”

“Yeah,” Richie promised. “For as long as you need me.” 

Eddie looked like shit, sure, but Richie filed away every soft curve of his features with all the worshipful intention that belonged entirely to his idea of the other. 

**Author's Note:**

> please remember to leave kudos and a comment to feed me!!!


End file.
